All posts tagged Homes

Kenneth Laub’s four-story townhouse on the Upper East Side in New York is back on the market.

The four-story townhouse of Kenneth Laub, a commercial real-estate broker, is back on the market for $27.5 million.

Located on East 64th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenues, the 8,000-square-foot home has five bedrooms, eightbathrooms, 12-foot ceilings and a bluestone terrace. There’s a music room and living room with French-Rocco era paintings inspired by the Fragonard room of the Frick Collection, a living room with a walnut bar, a walk-in wine cellar and a library with the original pine from when the home was built in 1872. There’s a personal gym, a separate staircase for staff from the kitchen to the dining room and a security system. Read More »

Looking to make a profit in New York’s competitive real estate market? The recent sales of several townhouses profiled by The Wall Street Journal’s “House of the Day” can provide a blueprint for would-be developers.

Flipping properties – buying a home, renovating it and then selling it — can be a profitable endeavor for a developer who spots a neighborhood or block on the rise, but sometimes it pays off to renovate a home while you live in it. And that way, the process can also become a true labor of love.

To do this, Trulia’s real estate analyst Michael Corbett, author of a book called “Find It, Fix It, Flip It,” encourages potential buyers to pinpoint the perfect location for their purchase, saying it’s “the best way to build equity in your home.” “You’re not just buying a house, you’re buying a neighborhood,” he said. Read More »

It’s never a good idea to make too much of one week’s real estate sales activity, and most brokers already tend to view their market’s glass as half full. But news that the week ending Sunday was the biggest for contracts signed on luxury properties since the collapse of Lehman Brothers ought to at least raise the question: Could the New York residential market be experiencing a turning point in sales activity?

“I think there’s a lot of optimism,” says Donna Olshan, head of the boutique brokerage firm Olshan Realty Inc., which compiled the data. She reports 31 contracts signed on properties with asking prices of $4 million or more in the week ending Feb. 13 — the highest weekly tally since Lehman went under in Sept. 2008.

There are plenty of reasons to consider this a statistical fluke. The snow and cold weather could have postponed some signings until last week. Many Wall Street bonuses were paid in the first few weeks of the year, generating demand among wealthy bankers that’s unlikely to be repeated in the months ahead.

And as Olshan points out, the previous post-Lehman weekly high was 27 contracts for luxury properties during the week ending Nov. 22, 2009. That proved to be an isolated surge in activity for what otherwise was a pretty grim year.

But those looking to make something more of last week’s numbers have some grist for that mill… Read More »

In January, Manhattan vacancy rates dropped for the first time in six months to 1.26% from 1.34% in December, real-estate brokerage firm CitiHabitats said in a monthly report.

In another sign the rental market is starting to tighten up there were 26% fewer vacant apartments on the market last month than during the same period last year, says CitiHabitats President Gary Malin. Read More »

A full moon rises behind the skyline of midtown Manhattan in New York.

The winter freeze has chilled Manhattan condominium prices.

In November, prices fell by 2.9% to $1,037.63 per square foot from October, according to real-estate data company Radar Logic’s monthly RPX index.

The decline marks a reversal from the upward trajectory Manhattan condo prices have been on since hitting a four-year low of $932.42 per square foot in May 2009. Since then, the city’s condo prices have increased by 12.4% through last November.

“We’ve come back but we’re still less than halfway back to the height of the boom in December 2008,” says Quinn Eddins, Radar Logic’s director of research. Read More »